Sunday, July 22, 2007

The LA Galaxy Game

We had an awesome time last night at the first LA Galaxy game of the season with my friend Mindy from work and her longtime buddy John.

Los Angeles' Galaxy were playing an exhibition match again England's Chelsea football team, one of the most highly ranked teams in the world and home to England stars Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and John Terry. It became evident early on that Chelsea was the better team, despite the claims of Galaxy coaches that MLS soccer can play with the 'big dogs' of Europe and South America. Mindy's friend J. (procurer of the tickets) works for the Chelsea team so we cheered on the English team amidst a crowd of true football fans. Here is a blow by blow of the game.Becks sat on the sidelines for the majority of the game. The crowd went wild every time he so much as tightened his shoelaces. They put him in for the last ten minutes of the game, to a huge standing ovation to the packed stadium. It was rather fun, really.Of course, Posh was there to cheer on her husband. By the looks of it, she brought along much of Hollywood: Katie Holmes, Suri Cruise, Eva Longoria, Alecia Silverstone, Arnold and Maria, one of the Olsen twins...

Really, how could you not love soccer?!A lot of attention has been devoted to David Beckham's enormous salary with the LA Galaxy. Judging by the millions of official David Beckham t-shirts we saw walking around the stadium last night, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a good investment on the part of the management team. I wonder a bit of his fellow teammates might resent him just a bit though: Ty Harden (a former UW soccer player) receives a grand total of $17,700/year to also play for the team (compared to Beckham's reported 6.5 million/year). That article can be found here.

2 comments:

Hi. It's Laurie from the LA Galaxy blog at The Offside. Thanks for the link!

I never saw any official notice of a raise for Ty Harden, but the salary list I saw most recently (post-Beckham arrival) lists him at $30,000. Woohoo, right?

Not exactly a living wage, but maybe this way he won't have to live on Top Ramen and hit mom and dad up for gas money.

But I think third string goalkeeper Lance Friesz is still under $13,000. And if I'm not mistaken, the union contract governing developmental player salaries runs till 2010, so it probably won't get better soon.